Quotes About Addiction

Addiction is a symptom of not growing up. I know people think it's a disease... If you have a brain tumor, if you have cancer, that's a disease. To say that an addiction is a disease is not fair to the real diseases of the world.

Every addiction arises from an unconscious refusal to face and move through your own pain. Every addiction starts with pain and ends with pain. Whatever the substance you are addicted to - alcohol, food, legal or illegal drugs, or a person - you are using something or somebody to cover up your pain.

It was an addiction. A pointless, self-destructive addiction. But really, is there any other kind?

If you're to the point where you're trying to overcome that means you're at the point where you've admitted that you have a problem, and that might be your strongest point in the addiction.

I used to find myself goofed out in the street on drugs. And I had such a bad problem with addiction at the time that I didn't mind. I was dealing cocaine and shooting up a lot of cocaine. And that's not a good space to be in.

Don't we get it? To put our arm around someone who is gay, someone who has an addiction, somebody who lives a different lifestyle, someone who is not what we think they should be... doing that has nothing to do with enabling them or accepting what they do as okay by us. It has nothing to do with encouraging them in their practice of what you or I might feel or believe is wrong vs right.It has everything to do with being a good human being. A good person. A good friend.

I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else, where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.

I have a writing addiction.

Practically every environmental problem we have can be traced to our addiction to fossil fuels, primarily oil.

Nothing is more singular about this generation than its addiction to music.

No time for drug addiction, no time for smoke or booze. Too strong for a shortened life span, I've got no time to lose.

How does the [New York] Times treat White pathology? They reported an epidemic of heroin addiction in the Philadelphia suburbs. which included emergency admissions and overdoses; these White people in the suburbs were doing heroin like it was going out of style. I counted the words: the article consisted of 200 words. "Heroin Epidemic" in the back section. Out here in California, the typical drug addict is a housewife or suburban White woman.

The hallmark of addiction is that it changes your brain chemistry. It actually affects that part of your brain that's responsible for judgment.

It's almost an addiction that some people have to what I call the perfection that Hollywood presents of successful, beautiful, fun-loving people.

If you're not filled back up quickly, you might collapse like a birthday balloon". I guess that's why acting is so addictive. For the director, that addiction will come from the love and trust he gets from the "orchestra", him being the conductor. That's why many directors fall in love with their leading lady/man: having someone say "how do you want me to be" is incredible.

I've had an addiction for a long time to the whole business of maximizing one's potential, what I call human activation. The vehicle for actualizing oneself is choice, options, seeking out the proper choices.

I smoke weed.It's not an addiction. It's something I wanna do. It's not smart though. It's not good for my body but I'm doing it. I'm not telling people to do it.

Addiction to food is unfortunately really grave, also to alcohol or to anything else.

If your addiction lingers, ask yourself if you really want to release it, because in your heart you do not.

For decades the American people have had an addiction to oil and gas.

A staggering 63 percent of Americans say that addiction to alcohol or other drugs has had an impact on them at some point in their lives.

Drug addiction is tearing our communities and our country apart, and until we decide we're going to think differently about it, until we decide that we're going to invest as a country in prevention and treatment, until we decide that as individuals we're going to step up and do our part to address this epidemic, we're not going to solve this.

When you're an addict, you can go without feeling anything except drunk or stoned or hungry. Still, when you compare this to other feelings, to sadness, anger, fear, worry, despair, and depression, well, an addiction no longer looks so bad. It looks like a very viable option.

For a decade Americans have been steeped in the rhetoric of "zero tolerance" and the faith that virtually all problems from drug addiction to lousy teaching can be solved by pouring on the punishment. Even without a Commander in Chief who pledges to rid the world of evildoers, smoke them out of their holes and the like, we would be vulnerable to the temptation to brush aside frustrating complexities and relieve intolerable fear (at least for the moment) by settling on one or more scapegoats to crush. To imagine that trauma casts out fantasy is a dangerous mistake.

There was a lot of tabloid journalism about my supposed sex addiction. Bullshit. It's all bullshit. I mean, come on, I never pretended to be a saint. But give me a break.

As you feel increasingly comfortable around your friends, I think it's more than fine to share the basic details of your heroin addiction with them. If they seem receptive, you can feel free to talk about it in further detail; if they seem judgmental or uncomfortable, you can move on to other topics.

Each and every child in this country is valuable because they are our future as a society. We cannot afford to lose a single child to ill-health, under-education, abuse, addiction, jail, or gun violence. America's highest goal should be for every child to grow up to be a successful young adult -- healthy, educated, free, secure, and a good citizen.

No-strings relationships have helped cure me of love addiction. All my life I've been in long-term monogamous relationships. I had to break that pattern by not allowing myself to have a relationship for a year, stopping myself from committing to men. I haven't been celibate. I've had lots of dates and lots of sex, but I haven't been pushing to turn a date into a relationship. This has been a huge thing for me.

Of what use is the universe? What is the practical application of a million galaxies? Yet just because it has no use, it has a use - which may sound like a paradox, but is not. What, for instance, is the use of playing music? If you play to make money, to outdo some other artist, to be a person of culture, or to improve your mind, you are not really playing - for your mind is not on the music. You don't swing. When you come to think of it, playing or listening to music is a pure luxury, an addiction, a waste of valuable time and money for nothing more than making elaborate patterns of sound.

I'm a former bulimic myself and it's a horrible, horrible addiction.

Now there is apparently a causal link between heroin addiction and vegetarianism.

I know in my soul when something feels like a sell out and I think for me, I knew that if I did the Jane's Addiction reunion thing, that I would feel like a sell out. That's how it would feel to me.

I am convinced now that virtually every destructive behavior and addiction I battled off and on for years was rooted in my (well-earned) insecurity.

Here's how I became myself: mess, failure, mistakes, disappointments, and extensive reading; limbo, indecision, setbacks, addiction, public embarrassment, and endless conversations with my best women friends; the loss of people without whom I could not live, the loss of pets that left me reeling, dizzying betrayals but much greater loyalty, and overall, choosing as my motto William Blake's line that we are here to learn to endure the beams of love.

I have an addiction to caffeine.

The stage is like an addiction. Since singing and dancing had been my dreams all this time, I fall even more into those charms every time I’m on stage. These days I get the urge to make the audience go crazy.

Even if nonpolluting power were feasible and abundant, the use of energy on a massive scale acts on society like a drug that is physically harmless but psychically enslaving. A community can choose between Methadone and "cold turkey"-between maintaining its addiction to alien energy and kicking it in painful cramps-but no society can have a population that is hooked on progressively larger numbers of energy slaves and whose members are also autonomously active.

You know you are addicted to a food if despite knowing it is bad for you and despite wanting to change, you still keep eating it. Addiction means that a craving has more control over your behavior than you do.

Addiction is not just for bad people or scumbags - it's a universal disease.

You cannot cheat with the law of conservation of violence: all violence is paid for, and for example, the structural violence exerted by the financial markets, in the form of layoffs, loss of security, etc., is matched sooner or later in the form of suicides, crime and delinquency, drug addiction, alcoholism, a whole host of minor and major everyday acts of violence.

Addiction, obesity, starvation (anorexia nervosa) are political problems, not psychiatric: each condense and expresses a contest between the individual and some other person or persons in his environment over the control of the individual's body.

If I were to find something that is going to be more important to me than fashion - that would be work and love - then I probably would let go. That's a possibility. But fashion is an addiction.

Unhealthy cultures create addiction. Healthy cultures create social bonds.

I remain convinced that obstinate addiction to ordinary language in our private thoughts is one of the main obstacles to progress in philosophy.

Irony is the hardest addiction of all. Forget heroin. Just try giving up irony, the deep-down need to mean two things at once, to be in two places at once, not to be there for the catastrophe of a fixed meaning.

People ask me a lot about my drive. I think it comes from, like, having a sexual addiction at a really young age. Look at the drive that people have to get sex - to dress like this and get a haircut and be in the club in the freezing cold at 3 A.M., the places they go to pick up a girl. If you can focus the energy into something valuable, put that into work ethic

We can no longer continue feeding our addiction to fossil fuels as if there is no tomorrow. For there will be no tomorrow.

[On his heroin addiction:] I did it to myself. It wasn't society...it wasn't a pusher, it wasn't being blind or being black or being poor. It was all my doing.